Jobster founder Phil Bogle joins iLike

Phillip Bogle, a co-founder and the former chief technology officer at Jobster, has joined Seattle online music service iLike as an engineer.

In a blog post, Bogle says he can’t comment on the project he is helping to develop.

Phil Bogle

But he did express enthusiasm for the fast-growing service, which is backed by Ticketmaster, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, MTV co-founder Bob Pittman and others.

Some of the things I like about iLike: the team combines smarts with personal integrity and minimal ego; they ship every week and iterate and learn rapidly; they have a small team and flat org structure without excessive overhead for meetings, process, or politics; they’ve built a valuable service with tens of millions of satisfied users (their FB app ranks among the top in terms of user ratings); each developer owns substantial feature areas; and they have interesting problems in scale, data mining, syndication, and user experience.

When Bogle left Jobster last year, he founded a new consumer Internet news service called MergeLab with former Jobster engineer Alan Steele. (Mark Aiken, who also was involved in MergeLab, also appears to have joined iLike.)

I have an e-mail into Bogle to find out about the status of MergeLab and learn more about his role at iLike.

UPDATE: MergeLab co-founder Alan Steele notes that they are shutting down the company at the end of the month.

“The Mergelab founding team has had lots of fun building this early stage product, and we have learned a lot about the both the product and business needs in this space, but we have made the difficult decision not to continue development,” the company says in a blog post.

In an e-mail, Steele says the founders bootstrapped the company. “It’s a really interesting space but tough to build a business around this sort of thing,” he said